Kate Levy: Can you tell me more about your specific experience in this one institution where the photographs take place? How did you get the opportunity to take photographs there?

Monika Merva: It was kind of wonderful. I had always done black and white street photography. But while I was living in Hungary [Merva’s Hungarian], I wanted to work with a community of people, and photograph something I could come back to over the years. I was talking with one of my cousins. She told me about this place called the City of Children, that I might love it. But then she told me I’d never get in there, and to scratch the idea.